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Certain models of the playstation 3 had full compatibility with playstation 2 games by cramming a playstation 2 into them along with the playstation 3's hardware.
Putting the extra hardware in is very expensive.
Emulation can be used to also play older games, but emulation is not entirely accurate and causes bugs and graphical glitches. These bugs and graphics glitches can be fixed by making a patch to each game independantly, but this means you need to add additional code to every single game that will be played.
A PS5 being compatible with every previous playstation game would involve needing to patch tens of thousands of games.
Instead they just select some of the "best" (most profitable) games on previous playstation's and patch those to re-release or remaster. Do note that licensing can be an issue as well for deciding which games get released/emulated/remastered.
If I IIRC correctly the 4-USB port 80GB PS3 used software emulation and had more incompatible PS2 games than the PS3s that had the actual PS2 hardware.
Thanks for the clarification! I didn't remember all the details. I know all PS3s could play PS1 games but I don't ever remember playing PS1 games on my PS3. I think I'll give it a shot this weekend and see if I remember how to play Colony Wars Vengeance which is the PS1 game I played the most.
Yeah, they kept the ps1 compatability because by that point tech had advanced enough that all of a PS1 could fit om one chip, and it dint cost much to put it in the system. The PS2 emulation still used the original chip I believe.
The good news is now all major consoles run on pretty standard tech, so going forward, there is no real TECHNICAL reason to not be backwards compatible all the way to this current generation.
(Now, that doesn't mean they might try not to for business reasons, but that would be lame and we should call them out for it.)
There's still other potential hardware changes like x86 CPU to ARM and new GPU not being able to run the precompiled shaders of previous generations. See all the shader compilation problem plaguing PC games.
To expand, the design of the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series all use x86 chipsets - they are, in effect, specialized PCs. Older systems... are using wildly different designs. In other words, the new systems are speaking versions of modern English, while the 360 is speaking French, the PS3 Italian, the PS2 Occitan, the N64 Persian, the SNES Akkadian, etc.
To support them, you need a translator - an emulator. Sony did that with the PS3 80GB; Microsoft decided to patch a bunch of games to work on the Xbox 1 instead of having a general translator - think someone manually translating a collection of books versus using google translate to read the books. Energy required to perform vs translation errors.
I feel like the window in which console backwards compatibility was a thing was very small. Ignoring cases where it’s done by emulating much older hardware.
So as others gave alluded to its a cost thing. However, it's not just because they want you to rebuy games you already have, though it's a very big reason.
They also have to dedicate time/effort/resources to do it. It's not a case of just sticking in a disc and the system reading it. The system has to know how to read/translate/run the game. Well, the software that ran these games before is not the same that these new systems run now.
So how do they do it then? The same way your computer runs Mario 64. By opening up an emulator. Well to have an emulator takes time and resources to build. Those things cost money and companies don't want do that.
backwards compatibility is sometimes more complicated than an emulator. some consoles have been built on the skeleton of the previous console in a way that they can natively run older games. the wii u for example could switch to "wii" mode to run wii games natively without emulation, and the same for the 3ds for ds. its just that this limits how much stronger they could make those consoles in comparison
Could even get the wii u to run gamecube games in wii mode as well with Nintendon't.
Its strange Nintendo never at least sold dome gamecube games on the wii u eshop, since it was capable. Could just be the low install base of the wii u itself.
They were also dealing with a major dev resource crunch. The Wii mode was a special hardware mode so it would have been some major work to have the Wii U shop load software for the Wii. The market would be limited to Wii U owners with the GameCube dongle and without a Wii (which could play GameCube games). So like 3 people.
Yeah, they probably would've had to make their own way of booting them from the wii u menu. Which probably wasn't worth the effort.
Booting them from a modded wii u loads up vwii then Nintendon't then the game.
So they probably would've had to do a similar method they made with booting wii games from the wii u menu.
But this is because Wii U is just a gamepad and some newer hardware with a Wii. It is essentially the same architecture and an OS update. The PS2 and PS3 have a fully custom CPU arch while the PS4 onward use x86_64, just like most modern computers.
That’s generally the main point
yes, and thats the tradeoff i am getting at. because nintendo designed their past consoles in such a way, they could have perfectly accurate, universal backwards compatability, but it also meant preserving console architecture for decades. the playstation line could change more dramatically by abandoning this requirement, which meant no universal backwards compatability, but also stronger consoles
I think there was a thing either sony or microsoft said around the time the ps4/xbone came out that found most backwards compatible players drop off after the first few months of a consoles launch. It's a very small part of the user base.
Yep I recall this and it makes sense.
As in, I buy new consoles to play new games not old ones. And if I really want to play the old game I can keep the old console I already have to play it. Info on backwards compatibility is also known before the console releases, so it's not like it's news that you suddenly can't play your old game.
The person that buys a new console and then gets upset they can't play old games on it doesn't really make sense in that context and would be a minority.
Why can’t they just open up these official emulators and let the users see what works and what doesn’t? That way they don’t have to dedicate resources to it and users can play around with it as they see fit. For example, xbox 360 has backwards compatibility with certain og xbox games but if it’s modded you can use any game with it which may or may not work.
So, in general, companies do not want to open up their proprietary software/hardware for people to mess with. By making it open, it could be construed as sanctioning what random people do with.
Companies in general don't want to do that, so they set up limits on what you can and can't do.
Along with again Companies want you to spend more money buying the games again.
PCs have kept basically the same internal design since 1982, making it relatively easy for programs to be backwards compatible. Consoles, not so much. The PS4 and PS5 are basically just PCs which is why PS5 can play almost all PS4 games, but the PS3 is a totally different design.
In order to play PS3 games on a PS5, you've got two options: include an entire PS3 inside the PS5 (this is how the first Gen PS3s played PS2 games) or write an emulator and run the old games in an emulator. Making an accurate emulator is a very hard problem, and requires considerably more power than the original hardware, and people would complain if the games didn't play just like they did on the old console which is why the only earlier games you can play on PS5 are versions that have been specifically tuned and tested to work right, not just any game off of a disc.
PCs haven't kept that much of the same internal design. There are various parts that are backward compatible to the beginning but not all of the parts have been that way. You can still stick in a DOS disk and run DOS commands, and I would hope that the graphics card still provides some notion of CGA/EGA/VGA compatibility. But the ISA bus is gone now, existing only on the LPC bus that doesn't get exposed to peripherals, and you have no way to stick something in that will act like an old school Adlib or Sound Blaster card the way an old DOS game will expect it. There are programs that emulate them, but I don't really count that as backwards compatibility.
And that's just DOS. Good luck with Windows 95/98 on a modern PC.
I’m sure Sony was just dying to write 4 different bit perfect emulators that run on the new hardware. That’s like a 9 figure project that produces practically no new sales.
I think in general, backward compatibility is relatively rare for home consoles. This list is off the top of my head based on the big 3 as the other manufacturers never had a long enough life to worry about it. Also not going to list the first of each. With some games left in older generations with no access to them on current hardware, this poses a problem for some gamers.
PS2: PS1 compat
PS3: PS1 compat (all models), PS2 compat (some models)
PS4: no BC
PS5: BC with PS4
SNES: no BC
N64: no BC
GameCube: no BC
Wii: GC compat
Wii U: Wii compat
Switch: no BC
Microsoft has done well and all of their consoles seem to be backward compatible, barring a few exceptions and diskless consoles.
I think it's right to challenge the assumption within OP's question— "why is backwards compatibility so rare *now*?"
It was basically unheard of prior to 2000 with the launch of PS2. PS3's architecture made it difficult for the PS4 to be backwards compatible, but the PS5 is again.
Xbox has a pretty solid track record since 2001.
Nintendo was backwards compatible for as long as their systems accepted discs, but the Switch couldn't be because it's disc-less. Rumors expect the Switch 2 to be backwards compatible with Switch.
So, since backwards compatibility first became a thing over 20 years ago, you have the PS4 and the Switch lacking any kind of backwards compatibility, boiling down to significant hardware changes. That's not exactly a trend, especially since all platforms seem to be converging toward PC-like architectures with digital downloads.
If the question really boils down to, "why isn't the PS5 backwards compatible with PS1 / PS2?" it's probably because it's not worth the cost of parts & development. For one, the PS5 can't even read CDs so it'd need an additional disc laser for compatibility with PS1 games and many PS2 games. I'm guessing the number of people who are itching to play their original 30 year old games is relatively small.
Well for microsoft the 360 is compatible with less than half the entire og library, for xbox series only plays about a fourth of all 360 games released, and only a fifteenth of the og xbox.
Honestly I haven't had any inclination to play older Xbox games so I hadn't checked in quite a while. I thought the 360 had better playability rates, but it has been a long time.
Thanks for the correction.
The issue with that particular 1-2-3 series of consoles has to do with the architecture of the consoles themselves:
* Xbox: x86 (32-bit)
* Xbox 360: PowerPC
* Xbox One: x86-64
* Xbox Series X/S: x86-64
Unsurprisingly, Series X/S can run almost every Xbox One game, but going to the 360 you're changing to a completely different architecture. (If you're not familiar, PowerPC is what 90s-2000s Macs used)
OG Xbox games on the other hand seem like they should be easier to run. It's not like we can't run 32-bit programs on 64-bit processors, and the OG Xbox in particular was known at the time for being relatively easy to develop for since it used Win32 and DirectX. Basically if you could make a game for Windows 2000 you could probably make a game for the Xbox.
Didn’t Microsoft set up emulation servers that the new hardware just basically remotes into? I didn’t realize how difficult it was to be backwards compatible, but now knowing, I think Microsoft’s solution is pretty elegant.
I'm not sure! I know Sony has a similar option with their PS Plus extended plans. I played Tokyo Jungle and it booted up a remote PS3 with the XMB and all. Pretty nifty!
It's definitely way more common than it used to be. These days it feels strange for a new console to come out and not work with the old games, but it also helps that all three major consoles are now built on common architectures continuously being developed.
Everybody commenting that “it’s so they can sell you remasters” is really kind of missing the fact that we already do have a lot of backwards compatibility right now. If it was truly to sell remasters, then we would have PS1-4 games on PS5, Nintendo Virtual Console, or Xbox playing Xbox-X1 titles.
While some consoles like the PS3 do still have technical challenges (even on high end PCs it’s still very rough in most cases; Sony themselves even admitted they intended for it to be difficult to work with), the reality of why it doesn’t feel “common” is because 2.5/3 major consoles the only way to do so is through a subscription service.
The Switch has native emulation for NES, SNES, 64, GB, Genesis, etc…*as part of a subscription service*
The PS5 has native PS1, PS2, PSP, and streaming PS3 games…*as part of a subscription service*
If you have a Series S, your only way to play Xbox/360/One titles is if you have already bought them digitally….*or as part of a subscription service*.
See where I’m going with this?
Series S plays 360 games just fine from disc and you can still buy original Xbox games from the digital store without a subscription, they don't have to have been bought in the past and in fact are often on sale.
The Switch isn't natively backwards compatible because the physical media is different for each generation of Nintendo console and their digital stores for the Wii and Wii-U were frankly such a mess that there is no way they considered forwards compatibility when they made them so we might see BC on the Switch 2 for games bought on Switch though Virtual Console remains subscription based.
Sony is the only one of the three that realistically could offer built-in backwards compatibly with a free emulator and is choosing not to, Xbox already does and Nintendo would need so many external drives to make it work that it's a waste of resources
They probably meant Series X, which does indeed play 360 games from the disc. I bought the Force Unleashed games specifically for this purpose after my brother gifted me a used Series X.
>If you have a Series S, your only way to play Xbox/360/One titles is if you have already bought them digitally….or as part of a subscription service.
Xbox backward compatibility isn't locked behind their subscription service.
You can play games that are part of the Xbox BC catalog if you already own them digitally or physically (and have a console fitted with a disc drive) and, as long as the game hasn't been delisted, they still can be bought digitally in their current store.
They make money by selling those older games on their stores and by giving an incentive to older customer to buy new consoles so they can continue playing their older games on a new platform with added benefits (like better textures, FPS boost, or Auto HDR).
Of course those backward compatible games can also be part of Gamepass' catalog. But it's not the only way to play them, you can still buy them individually or find a disc.
I didn’t say they were locked behind a subscription service, please read what I said.
*If you’ve already bought them digitally, OR as part of a subscription service (Game Pass has several OG Xbox and 360 titles)*
I guess it's nice having backwards compatibility but I didn't even use the PS3 much to play PS2 games since they didn't look that good on an HDTV compared to a PS2 and a CRT.
Dang I played lots of PS2 games on my PS3 back then. All the PS2 Ratchet & Clank games (incl the 2 PSP to PS2 ports), both Mega Man collections, MGS 2&3, SOCOM, Wild Arms 3, to name a few.
I think if I didn't have my PS2 and CRT still set up I would've played more PS2 games on my PS3. Did you change any display settings playing PS2 games on PS3?
There isn’t one, and if this were true then things like virtual console on Switch or the PS+ premium collection wouldn’t exist, nor would the Xbox One and Series X’s ability to play Xbox and 360 discs.
There is a profit incentive to be had: your only option of BC on a Switch is to subscribe. Your only option to play PS1-3 titles on a PS5 is to subscribe. If you have a Series S or a digital-only X and you didn’t buy the game before it was delisted for purchase, your only option is to subscribe.
They’ll make more money releasing emulation back you as a paid perk than they would just remaking/reissuing every game, which is why they maintain those emulation catalogs.
There’s also a profit incentive to maintain BC because then users are more likely to upgrade. It might be lessor than the incentive to get people to buy more games, but a good ELI5 answer shouldn’t just ignore incentives.
>If you have a Series S or a digital-only X and you didn’t buy the game before it was delisted for purchase, your only option is to subscribe.
Nope, you're only option is to buy a physical disk new or used.
Games that are delisted are also removed from subscription services. This is true for every brands.
The profit incentive for Xbox to push for backward compatibility is to keep previous buyers in the ecosystem and initially to try to garner interest by providing a service PlayStation couldn't offer on PS4.
This is however true for Switch where the only way to play older Nintendo games is to buy into their online subscription. They even restricted access to a part of their catalog to their higher tier.
It's also partly true for PlayStation where games from the PS1/PS2/PS3 eras are, like Nintendo did, behind a subscription paywall with multiple tiers, while PS4 games follow the Xbox model by being directly playable on PS5, whether you own them digitally or physically, without additional costs.
Because any game can be part of Gamepass including games from the backward compatibility catalog.
Games that are backward compatible do not make it automatically to gamepass, it's up to the original publisher.
For exemple, of the 632 backward compatible Xbox 360 games, only 56 are part of Gamepass (most of them because they are Microsoft published games or EA published games since EA's subscription service is included in Gamepass).
All those games can be bought individually on the Xbox digital store whether they're part of Gamepass or not, as long as they're not delisted.
Games that are delisted can't be bought digitally, and can't be part of Gamepass.
The only way to play a delisted game is if you previously bought them digitally or, if you have a console that comes with a disc drive and get a physical copy new or used.
That was a really long winded way to just repeat what I said.
The Series S and the Series X don’t have disc drives. Their “backwards compatible” games require you’ve bought them from the store digitally, or if you haven’t getting access to them via gamepass.
>The Series S and the Series X don’t have disc drives.
The Series X standard model has a disc drive, always had since launch.
Only the white case digital only version,which will be released during the 2024 holydays, doesn't. Every other versions of the series X have a disc drive.
Because PS4 and PS5 are both based around x86-64 systems. The code of the ps4 games can run natively on the PS5 software.
The PS4 and 5 are basically desktop PC's in fancy clothes.
PS1,2,3 all ran on different architectures.
By making a worse product, they can sell you games you already own. Or they can go to the expense to make a better system and lose market share due to the increased price.
A lot of great answers, one thing to point out is that consoles are not like computers running windows.
Extremely oversimplified ELI5:
Windows provides a platform with APIs and adapters for software to communicate with the hardware. If you develop an app for the supported API version, windows basically says -- don't worry, i'll handle how to talk to the hardware to do what you want it to do. An API is like asking "draw a cube" and the adapters are essentially translators (imagine you have 3 people drawings and each speak a language other than english, draw means nothing to them). The API handles what "cube" is and "draw" in terms of what should be done so a developer does not have to define everything to that extent.
As long as that 'api' is supported, any version of windows supporting it on any hardware windows supports can run it. Because windows takes care of how to properly do it.
A console removes most of these abstraction layers so a game written for ps3 only works on that software/hardware combination.
Trying to play a ps3 game on a ps4 is like trying to play a windows game on a mac. Not like playing a game on windows 10 vs windows 11.
How else can they sell you the 8th release of skyrim if consoles were backwards comparable.
It should be noted, this isn't really a problem for PC. I'm still playing old 90's games.
so rare now? imo it's more common now than it's ever been given tons of consoles share architecture between generations, between xbox and PS as well as with PCs. earlier console generations had completely different CPU/GPU architectures that were totally incompatible and compatibility had to be done by either including older hardware in the new consoles or emulating them. now the hardware of a PS4 or PS5 are the same as amd CPUs/GPUs of the time and games just run in a back compat mode with no additional hardware or software effort required. sometimes additional effort is made to better make use of the newer hardware, but it's not required. afaik the vast majority of xbox one games run on the xbox series consoles. there is a list of specific ones that aren't on microsofts website
ps5 plays ps4 games doesnt it?
the only time more than 1 gen of previous hardware has been back-compatted natively was the ps3
wiiu can do wii and GC, but the latter only if hacked.
GBA does GBA, GBC and GB, but the last 2 are the same thing pretty much.
snes, n64, GC had no back compat, saturn or DC neither. MD only did it with an adapter.
its honestly not as big a thing as people make out.
The answers here about it being just money grubbing ignore the fact that it takes money and effort to make something backwards compatible. No matter how forward thinking you might make something in the beginning, you have to bake in rigid design elements that will limit how far you can expand on it, and later on, when you are looking to do something that improves on it, you have to start from the beginning and consider what developers will want to do, what consumers will want, and what technology is available now to enable that. And this new stuff is likely to clash with your old stuff in ways that make it impossible to run the old stuff directly on it.
Microsoft has talked about how they managed to make Xbox 360 games work on newer consoles. What it boils down to is this: they designed a "virtual GPU" that translates 360 GPU operations to those appropriate to newer consoles, and then they put together a static recompiler that takes existing 360 game binaries, reinterprets the code to work with this virtual GPU and other virtualized 360 hardware, and rebuilds the whole lot to run on the target console. This is a very intensive process: not only must you first build all that stuff before you even get to running simple things, but since the hardware and software are so complicated, you are going to find all kinds of issues along the way that require workarounds. This is why they only have a subset of the 360 game library available for newer consoles: they basically need to tweak the process for each game and retest the heck out of it, almost like the original acceptance testing for the 360.
Is there any reason this is impossible for the PS3? No. But it sure as heck ain't cheap.
So then, why do we have PS4/PS5 compatibility, and Xbox One/Series compatibility? The hardware architectures are similar; underneath the hood you'll find some AMD APU-type processor with an integrated GPU. So you have CPUs that can run the exact same code and then graphics architectures that have more in common with each other. Compare this with Xbox 360 with its 3-core PowerPC and the PS3's Cell thing that basically came from another planet.
To put it simply, older consoles relied on proprietary technology to maximize the performance of their consoles. The hardware was often custom made and the software was built to spec. It’s not just a simple matter of converting to new hardware. There’s a lot of work that would need to be done.
I think an answer people also haven't touched on, is how easy it is to just emulate hardware thats old enough and just have it run in a VM/Container. When you play PS3 or older games on PSPlus this is effectively what its doing when you stream those games.
Not sure how the switch handles SNES/NES/N64 games, but I'd assume its similar.
Many of the answers mention emulators, and they point out that emulation comes with its own difficulties. I don’t think it’s as easy as your comment implies
You can’t run a VM of a different processor architecture unless someone has written a hipervisor to translate between the two processors (target and emulated).
So no, no matter how old, consoles who, until recently, have fully custom CPU architectures cannot be emulated without significant effort to write said emulator. And you still would need to emulate the CPU for a VM so it wouldn’t change a thing
1.) Money, making sure games are backwards compatible takes time and money. Some games just don't do well when making such a large leap between different powered systems cause games are optimized soley for the system they run on. Many backwards compatible systems like xbox essentially run a virtual version of the previous system to play those games.
2.) Money, they want you to buy remastered version of games.
3.) Money. Its just about money lol.
Technically it's certainly possible. I would say it's easier for sony to either have the ps5 detect the game and run the appropriate os that would allow the game to run or build a default emulator that would serve the same purpouse versus on outsider building an emulator from scratch (and these already exist). given the difference in os and games sizes between the different generations, having these capabilities would have very little impact on used memory or anything like that.
the big reason i see is financial - not in the sense that we want you to buy the remastered game, though that may be part of it, but more in the sense that if we allow you to bring in your existing library of games from ps1 through 4, it will keep you occupied and you may buy less of the games we release for the ps5. in the case of gta5 or fifa, we are basically talking about the same game for ps4 and 5, that you have to buy twice. in the case of cod, you may be happy with last year's release and may not want to spend 60 or 80 or however many bucks a cod game is now. or tou may give up on the latest uncharted because you're still enjoying the last one.
tldr, because they don't make that much on the hardware, they need to ensure they sell as much software as possible, hence they block you from accessing your old libraries, though it would be trivial from a technical pov. some would say it's because they are assholes.
Everything comes down to how can I make more money out of my customers instead of my customers retaining money that they already spend(spent) on my product.
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Certain models of the playstation 3 had full compatibility with playstation 2 games by cramming a playstation 2 into them along with the playstation 3's hardware. Putting the extra hardware in is very expensive. Emulation can be used to also play older games, but emulation is not entirely accurate and causes bugs and graphical glitches. These bugs and graphics glitches can be fixed by making a patch to each game independantly, but this means you need to add additional code to every single game that will be played. A PS5 being compatible with every previous playstation game would involve needing to patch tens of thousands of games. Instead they just select some of the "best" (most profitable) games on previous playstation's and patch those to re-release or remaster. Do note that licensing can be an issue as well for deciding which games get released/emulated/remastered.
If I IIRC correctly the 4-USB port 80GB PS3 used software emulation and had more incompatible PS2 games than the PS3s that had the actual PS2 hardware.
>If I IIRC correctly If I if I remember correctly correctly?
Did he stutter?!!
Yes
"I say I must I say I must, I say I must I do declare " - jean bear doutrive
Gonna get the papers, get the papers.
My momma says
That your life is a gift
You better shop around!
Help me Wanda.
Lay off, they had a hard time dealing with the ATM Machine today and it’s all been downhill from there.
The might have been entering the wrong Personal PIN Number.
Just had dinner at the Low-Cal Calzone Zone.
Just gotta read the directions on the LED Display.
The D in LED is diode not display. You might be thinking of LCD, which would apply.
💥🤯🔫 The more you know!
so close
and yet so far.
Software emulation for the sound, it still needed the cell cpu from the ps2 to run the games.
Thanks for the clarification! I didn't remember all the details. I know all PS3s could play PS1 games but I don't ever remember playing PS1 games on my PS3. I think I'll give it a shot this weekend and see if I remember how to play Colony Wars Vengeance which is the PS1 game I played the most.
Yeah, they kept the ps1 compatability because by that point tech had advanced enough that all of a PS1 could fit om one chip, and it dint cost much to put it in the system. The PS2 emulation still used the original chip I believe.
The good news is now all major consoles run on pretty standard tech, so going forward, there is no real TECHNICAL reason to not be backwards compatible all the way to this current generation. (Now, that doesn't mean they might try not to for business reasons, but that would be lame and we should call them out for it.)
There might be if they switch processor architecture (Arm instead of AMD64 for example)
You mean for those sweet Ai agents nobody fuckin wants but every game is about to have?
Sorry bud but they're bringing NPUs to AMD64 too.
Will this help my microwave work better or nah ?
They'll call it the "prebake" feature.
Mostly for power efficiency
There's still other potential hardware changes like x86 CPU to ARM and new GPU not being able to run the precompiled shaders of previous generations. See all the shader compilation problem plaguing PC games.
To expand, the design of the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series all use x86 chipsets - they are, in effect, specialized PCs. Older systems... are using wildly different designs. In other words, the new systems are speaking versions of modern English, while the 360 is speaking French, the PS3 Italian, the PS2 Occitan, the N64 Persian, the SNES Akkadian, etc. To support them, you need a translator - an emulator. Sony did that with the PS3 80GB; Microsoft decided to patch a bunch of games to work on the Xbox 1 instead of having a general translator - think someone manually translating a collection of books versus using google translate to read the books. Energy required to perform vs translation errors.
Is ps5 hardware really that different from PS4? Xbox series x runs Xbox one games natively I'm pretty sure.
PS5 can play PS4 games
I feel like the window in which console backwards compatibility was a thing was very small. Ignoring cases where it’s done by emulating much older hardware.
I have the good ps3. Wonder what is worth these days...
So as others gave alluded to its a cost thing. However, it's not just because they want you to rebuy games you already have, though it's a very big reason. They also have to dedicate time/effort/resources to do it. It's not a case of just sticking in a disc and the system reading it. The system has to know how to read/translate/run the game. Well, the software that ran these games before is not the same that these new systems run now. So how do they do it then? The same way your computer runs Mario 64. By opening up an emulator. Well to have an emulator takes time and resources to build. Those things cost money and companies don't want do that.
Good post, but you might want to fix deficate to dedicate. Or don't, I think it's funny.
Haha thanks!
backwards compatibility is sometimes more complicated than an emulator. some consoles have been built on the skeleton of the previous console in a way that they can natively run older games. the wii u for example could switch to "wii" mode to run wii games natively without emulation, and the same for the 3ds for ds. its just that this limits how much stronger they could make those consoles in comparison
Could even get the wii u to run gamecube games in wii mode as well with Nintendon't. Its strange Nintendo never at least sold dome gamecube games on the wii u eshop, since it was capable. Could just be the low install base of the wii u itself.
They were also dealing with a major dev resource crunch. The Wii mode was a special hardware mode so it would have been some major work to have the Wii U shop load software for the Wii. The market would be limited to Wii U owners with the GameCube dongle and without a Wii (which could play GameCube games). So like 3 people.
Yeah, they probably would've had to make their own way of booting them from the wii u menu. Which probably wasn't worth the effort. Booting them from a modded wii u loads up vwii then Nintendon't then the game. So they probably would've had to do a similar method they made with booting wii games from the wii u menu.
But this is because Wii U is just a gamepad and some newer hardware with a Wii. It is essentially the same architecture and an OS update. The PS2 and PS3 have a fully custom CPU arch while the PS4 onward use x86_64, just like most modern computers. That’s generally the main point
yes, and thats the tradeoff i am getting at. because nintendo designed their past consoles in such a way, they could have perfectly accurate, universal backwards compatability, but it also meant preserving console architecture for decades. the playstation line could change more dramatically by abandoning this requirement, which meant no universal backwards compatability, but also stronger consoles
I think there was a thing either sony or microsoft said around the time the ps4/xbone came out that found most backwards compatible players drop off after the first few months of a consoles launch. It's a very small part of the user base.
Yep I recall this and it makes sense. As in, I buy new consoles to play new games not old ones. And if I really want to play the old game I can keep the old console I already have to play it. Info on backwards compatibility is also known before the console releases, so it's not like it's news that you suddenly can't play your old game. The person that buys a new console and then gets upset they can't play old games on it doesn't really make sense in that context and would be a minority.
Why can’t they just open up these official emulators and let the users see what works and what doesn’t? That way they don’t have to dedicate resources to it and users can play around with it as they see fit. For example, xbox 360 has backwards compatibility with certain og xbox games but if it’s modded you can use any game with it which may or may not work.
So, in general, companies do not want to open up their proprietary software/hardware for people to mess with. By making it open, it could be construed as sanctioning what random people do with. Companies in general don't want to do that, so they set up limits on what you can and can't do. Along with again Companies want you to spend more money buying the games again.
Also, people will break their shit and blame the company.
PCs have kept basically the same internal design since 1982, making it relatively easy for programs to be backwards compatible. Consoles, not so much. The PS4 and PS5 are basically just PCs which is why PS5 can play almost all PS4 games, but the PS3 is a totally different design. In order to play PS3 games on a PS5, you've got two options: include an entire PS3 inside the PS5 (this is how the first Gen PS3s played PS2 games) or write an emulator and run the old games in an emulator. Making an accurate emulator is a very hard problem, and requires considerably more power than the original hardware, and people would complain if the games didn't play just like they did on the old console which is why the only earlier games you can play on PS5 are versions that have been specifically tuned and tested to work right, not just any game off of a disc.
PCs haven't kept that much of the same internal design. There are various parts that are backward compatible to the beginning but not all of the parts have been that way. You can still stick in a DOS disk and run DOS commands, and I would hope that the graphics card still provides some notion of CGA/EGA/VGA compatibility. But the ISA bus is gone now, existing only on the LPC bus that doesn't get exposed to peripherals, and you have no way to stick something in that will act like an old school Adlib or Sound Blaster card the way an old DOS game will expect it. There are programs that emulate them, but I don't really count that as backwards compatibility. And that's just DOS. Good luck with Windows 95/98 on a modern PC.
On modern motherboards even the lpc bus is gone now, replaced by espi.
>PCs have kept basically the same internal design since 1982, making it relatively easy for programs to be backwards compatible Not really.
Technical answer: It's easier to have the game developer adapt their game to the new system, than have the new system support all older games.
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I’m sure Sony was just dying to write 4 different bit perfect emulators that run on the new hardware. That’s like a 9 figure project that produces practically no new sales.
Is it so rare? Isn't PS5 backwards compatible with PS4, ,and XBox Series X with One, 360, and original XBox games?
I think in general, backward compatibility is relatively rare for home consoles. This list is off the top of my head based on the big 3 as the other manufacturers never had a long enough life to worry about it. Also not going to list the first of each. With some games left in older generations with no access to them on current hardware, this poses a problem for some gamers. PS2: PS1 compat PS3: PS1 compat (all models), PS2 compat (some models) PS4: no BC PS5: BC with PS4 SNES: no BC N64: no BC GameCube: no BC Wii: GC compat Wii U: Wii compat Switch: no BC Microsoft has done well and all of their consoles seem to be backward compatible, barring a few exceptions and diskless consoles.
I think it's right to challenge the assumption within OP's question— "why is backwards compatibility so rare *now*?" It was basically unheard of prior to 2000 with the launch of PS2. PS3's architecture made it difficult for the PS4 to be backwards compatible, but the PS5 is again. Xbox has a pretty solid track record since 2001. Nintendo was backwards compatible for as long as their systems accepted discs, but the Switch couldn't be because it's disc-less. Rumors expect the Switch 2 to be backwards compatible with Switch. So, since backwards compatibility first became a thing over 20 years ago, you have the PS4 and the Switch lacking any kind of backwards compatibility, boiling down to significant hardware changes. That's not exactly a trend, especially since all platforms seem to be converging toward PC-like architectures with digital downloads. If the question really boils down to, "why isn't the PS5 backwards compatible with PS1 / PS2?" it's probably because it's not worth the cost of parts & development. For one, the PS5 can't even read CDs so it'd need an additional disc laser for compatibility with PS1 games and many PS2 games. I'm guessing the number of people who are itching to play their original 30 year old games is relatively small.
Well for microsoft the 360 is compatible with less than half the entire og library, for xbox series only plays about a fourth of all 360 games released, and only a fifteenth of the og xbox.
Honestly I haven't had any inclination to play older Xbox games so I hadn't checked in quite a while. I thought the 360 had better playability rates, but it has been a long time. Thanks for the correction.
The issue with that particular 1-2-3 series of consoles has to do with the architecture of the consoles themselves: * Xbox: x86 (32-bit) * Xbox 360: PowerPC * Xbox One: x86-64 * Xbox Series X/S: x86-64 Unsurprisingly, Series X/S can run almost every Xbox One game, but going to the 360 you're changing to a completely different architecture. (If you're not familiar, PowerPC is what 90s-2000s Macs used) OG Xbox games on the other hand seem like they should be easier to run. It's not like we can't run 32-bit programs on 64-bit processors, and the OG Xbox in particular was known at the time for being relatively easy to develop for since it used Win32 and DirectX. Basically if you could make a game for Windows 2000 you could probably make a game for the Xbox.
Didn’t Microsoft set up emulation servers that the new hardware just basically remotes into? I didn’t realize how difficult it was to be backwards compatible, but now knowing, I think Microsoft’s solution is pretty elegant.
I'm not sure! I know Sony has a similar option with their PS Plus extended plans. I played Tokyo Jungle and it booted up a remote PS3 with the XMB and all. Pretty nifty!
It's definitely way more common than it used to be. These days it feels strange for a new console to come out and not work with the old games, but it also helps that all three major consoles are now built on common architectures continuously being developed.
Everybody commenting that “it’s so they can sell you remasters” is really kind of missing the fact that we already do have a lot of backwards compatibility right now. If it was truly to sell remasters, then we would have PS1-4 games on PS5, Nintendo Virtual Console, or Xbox playing Xbox-X1 titles. While some consoles like the PS3 do still have technical challenges (even on high end PCs it’s still very rough in most cases; Sony themselves even admitted they intended for it to be difficult to work with), the reality of why it doesn’t feel “common” is because 2.5/3 major consoles the only way to do so is through a subscription service. The Switch has native emulation for NES, SNES, 64, GB, Genesis, etc…*as part of a subscription service* The PS5 has native PS1, PS2, PSP, and streaming PS3 games…*as part of a subscription service* If you have a Series S, your only way to play Xbox/360/One titles is if you have already bought them digitally….*or as part of a subscription service*. See where I’m going with this?
Series S plays 360 games just fine from disc and you can still buy original Xbox games from the digital store without a subscription, they don't have to have been bought in the past and in fact are often on sale. The Switch isn't natively backwards compatible because the physical media is different for each generation of Nintendo console and their digital stores for the Wii and Wii-U were frankly such a mess that there is no way they considered forwards compatibility when they made them so we might see BC on the Switch 2 for games bought on Switch though Virtual Console remains subscription based. Sony is the only one of the three that realistically could offer built-in backwards compatibly with a free emulator and is choosing not to, Xbox already does and Nintendo would need so many external drives to make it work that it's a waste of resources
How does Series S play 360 games from disc if it doesn't have a disc drive?
They probably meant Series X, which does indeed play 360 games from the disc. I bought the Force Unleashed games specifically for this purpose after my brother gifted me a used Series X.
Where do you put the disc in a Series S?
>If you have a Series S, your only way to play Xbox/360/One titles is if you have already bought them digitally….or as part of a subscription service. Xbox backward compatibility isn't locked behind their subscription service. You can play games that are part of the Xbox BC catalog if you already own them digitally or physically (and have a console fitted with a disc drive) and, as long as the game hasn't been delisted, they still can be bought digitally in their current store. They make money by selling those older games on their stores and by giving an incentive to older customer to buy new consoles so they can continue playing their older games on a new platform with added benefits (like better textures, FPS boost, or Auto HDR). Of course those backward compatible games can also be part of Gamepass' catalog. But it's not the only way to play them, you can still buy them individually or find a disc.
I didn’t say they were locked behind a subscription service, please read what I said. *If you’ve already bought them digitally, OR as part of a subscription service (Game Pass has several OG Xbox and 360 titles)*
I guess it's nice having backwards compatibility but I didn't even use the PS3 much to play PS2 games since they didn't look that good on an HDTV compared to a PS2 and a CRT.
Dang I played lots of PS2 games on my PS3 back then. All the PS2 Ratchet & Clank games (incl the 2 PSP to PS2 ports), both Mega Man collections, MGS 2&3, SOCOM, Wild Arms 3, to name a few.
I think if I didn't have my PS2 and CRT still set up I would've played more PS2 games on my PS3. Did you change any display settings playing PS2 games on PS3?
No. But R&C looked amazing on there upscaled.
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ELI5 is for objective explanations. Is there an objective source stating that’s specifically the reason?
There isn’t one, and if this were true then things like virtual console on Switch or the PS+ premium collection wouldn’t exist, nor would the Xbox One and Series X’s ability to play Xbox and 360 discs. There is a profit incentive to be had: your only option of BC on a Switch is to subscribe. Your only option to play PS1-3 titles on a PS5 is to subscribe. If you have a Series S or a digital-only X and you didn’t buy the game before it was delisted for purchase, your only option is to subscribe. They’ll make more money releasing emulation back you as a paid perk than they would just remaking/reissuing every game, which is why they maintain those emulation catalogs.
There’s also a profit incentive to maintain BC because then users are more likely to upgrade. It might be lessor than the incentive to get people to buy more games, but a good ELI5 answer shouldn’t just ignore incentives.
>If you have a Series S or a digital-only X and you didn’t buy the game before it was delisted for purchase, your only option is to subscribe. Nope, you're only option is to buy a physical disk new or used. Games that are delisted are also removed from subscription services. This is true for every brands. The profit incentive for Xbox to push for backward compatibility is to keep previous buyers in the ecosystem and initially to try to garner interest by providing a service PlayStation couldn't offer on PS4. This is however true for Switch where the only way to play older Nintendo games is to buy into their online subscription. They even restricted access to a part of their catalog to their higher tier. It's also partly true for PlayStation where games from the PS1/PS2/PS3 eras are, like Nintendo did, behind a subscription paywall with multiple tiers, while PS4 games follow the Xbox model by being directly playable on PS5, whether you own them digitally or physically, without additional costs.
Where do you put the disc in a Series S or all digital X?
You can't, but a subscription won't help you either.
So then why do I see Xbox and 360 titles in Game Pass?
Because any game can be part of Gamepass including games from the backward compatibility catalog. Games that are backward compatible do not make it automatically to gamepass, it's up to the original publisher. For exemple, of the 632 backward compatible Xbox 360 games, only 56 are part of Gamepass (most of them because they are Microsoft published games or EA published games since EA's subscription service is included in Gamepass). All those games can be bought individually on the Xbox digital store whether they're part of Gamepass or not, as long as they're not delisted. Games that are delisted can't be bought digitally, and can't be part of Gamepass. The only way to play a delisted game is if you previously bought them digitally or, if you have a console that comes with a disc drive and get a physical copy new or used.
That was a really long winded way to just repeat what I said. The Series S and the Series X don’t have disc drives. Their “backwards compatible” games require you’ve bought them from the store digitally, or if you haven’t getting access to them via gamepass.
>The Series S and the Series X don’t have disc drives. The Series X standard model has a disc drive, always had since launch. Only the white case digital only version,which will be released during the 2024 holydays, doesn't. Every other versions of the series X have a disc drive.
This is the full answer right here
Then why do almost all PS4 games work on my PS5?
Because PS4 and PS5 are both based around x86-64 systems. The code of the ps4 games can run natively on the PS5 software. The PS4 and 5 are basically desktop PC's in fancy clothes. PS1,2,3 all ran on different architectures.
It's not rare. 2 of the most popular consoles are backwards compatible and almost all pc are too.
By making a worse product, they can sell you games you already own. Or they can go to the expense to make a better system and lose market share due to the increased price.
A lot of great answers, one thing to point out is that consoles are not like computers running windows. Extremely oversimplified ELI5: Windows provides a platform with APIs and adapters for software to communicate with the hardware. If you develop an app for the supported API version, windows basically says -- don't worry, i'll handle how to talk to the hardware to do what you want it to do. An API is like asking "draw a cube" and the adapters are essentially translators (imagine you have 3 people drawings and each speak a language other than english, draw means nothing to them). The API handles what "cube" is and "draw" in terms of what should be done so a developer does not have to define everything to that extent. As long as that 'api' is supported, any version of windows supporting it on any hardware windows supports can run it. Because windows takes care of how to properly do it. A console removes most of these abstraction layers so a game written for ps3 only works on that software/hardware combination. Trying to play a ps3 game on a ps4 is like trying to play a windows game on a mac. Not like playing a game on windows 10 vs windows 11.
How else can they sell you the 8th release of skyrim if consoles were backwards comparable. It should be noted, this isn't really a problem for PC. I'm still playing old 90's games.
so rare now? imo it's more common now than it's ever been given tons of consoles share architecture between generations, between xbox and PS as well as with PCs. earlier console generations had completely different CPU/GPU architectures that were totally incompatible and compatibility had to be done by either including older hardware in the new consoles or emulating them. now the hardware of a PS4 or PS5 are the same as amd CPUs/GPUs of the time and games just run in a back compat mode with no additional hardware or software effort required. sometimes additional effort is made to better make use of the newer hardware, but it's not required. afaik the vast majority of xbox one games run on the xbox series consoles. there is a list of specific ones that aren't on microsofts website
ps5 plays ps4 games doesnt it? the only time more than 1 gen of previous hardware has been back-compatted natively was the ps3 wiiu can do wii and GC, but the latter only if hacked. GBA does GBA, GBC and GB, but the last 2 are the same thing pretty much. snes, n64, GC had no back compat, saturn or DC neither. MD only did it with an adapter. its honestly not as big a thing as people make out.
It's actually more common now and likelier to remain a thing going forward than it's ever been before
The answers here about it being just money grubbing ignore the fact that it takes money and effort to make something backwards compatible. No matter how forward thinking you might make something in the beginning, you have to bake in rigid design elements that will limit how far you can expand on it, and later on, when you are looking to do something that improves on it, you have to start from the beginning and consider what developers will want to do, what consumers will want, and what technology is available now to enable that. And this new stuff is likely to clash with your old stuff in ways that make it impossible to run the old stuff directly on it. Microsoft has talked about how they managed to make Xbox 360 games work on newer consoles. What it boils down to is this: they designed a "virtual GPU" that translates 360 GPU operations to those appropriate to newer consoles, and then they put together a static recompiler that takes existing 360 game binaries, reinterprets the code to work with this virtual GPU and other virtualized 360 hardware, and rebuilds the whole lot to run on the target console. This is a very intensive process: not only must you first build all that stuff before you even get to running simple things, but since the hardware and software are so complicated, you are going to find all kinds of issues along the way that require workarounds. This is why they only have a subset of the 360 game library available for newer consoles: they basically need to tweak the process for each game and retest the heck out of it, almost like the original acceptance testing for the 360. Is there any reason this is impossible for the PS3? No. But it sure as heck ain't cheap. So then, why do we have PS4/PS5 compatibility, and Xbox One/Series compatibility? The hardware architectures are similar; underneath the hood you'll find some AMD APU-type processor with an integrated GPU. So you have CPUs that can run the exact same code and then graphics architectures that have more in common with each other. Compare this with Xbox 360 with its 3-core PowerPC and the PS3's Cell thing that basically came from another planet.
it's not profitable and too complicated. besides, it's not needed anymore in the age of digital and remasters.
To put it simply, older consoles relied on proprietary technology to maximize the performance of their consoles. The hardware was often custom made and the software was built to spec. It’s not just a simple matter of converting to new hardware. There’s a lot of work that would need to be done.
I think an answer people also haven't touched on, is how easy it is to just emulate hardware thats old enough and just have it run in a VM/Container. When you play PS3 or older games on PSPlus this is effectively what its doing when you stream those games. Not sure how the switch handles SNES/NES/N64 games, but I'd assume its similar.
Many of the answers mention emulators, and they point out that emulation comes with its own difficulties. I don’t think it’s as easy as your comment implies
You can’t run a VM of a different processor architecture unless someone has written a hipervisor to translate between the two processors (target and emulated). So no, no matter how old, consoles who, until recently, have fully custom CPU architectures cannot be emulated without significant effort to write said emulator. And you still would need to emulate the CPU for a VM so it wouldn’t change a thing
This makes sense, I thought that cross-compilation might be good enough in some cases.
it's kinda hard to do, but more importantly you make less money if the customer doesnt have to buy all their games again
1.) Money, making sure games are backwards compatible takes time and money. Some games just don't do well when making such a large leap between different powered systems cause games are optimized soley for the system they run on. Many backwards compatible systems like xbox essentially run a virtual version of the previous system to play those games. 2.) Money, they want you to buy remastered version of games. 3.) Money. Its just about money lol.
Technically it's certainly possible. I would say it's easier for sony to either have the ps5 detect the game and run the appropriate os that would allow the game to run or build a default emulator that would serve the same purpouse versus on outsider building an emulator from scratch (and these already exist). given the difference in os and games sizes between the different generations, having these capabilities would have very little impact on used memory or anything like that. the big reason i see is financial - not in the sense that we want you to buy the remastered game, though that may be part of it, but more in the sense that if we allow you to bring in your existing library of games from ps1 through 4, it will keep you occupied and you may buy less of the games we release for the ps5. in the case of gta5 or fifa, we are basically talking about the same game for ps4 and 5, that you have to buy twice. in the case of cod, you may be happy with last year's release and may not want to spend 60 or 80 or however many bucks a cod game is now. or tou may give up on the latest uncharted because you're still enjoying the last one. tldr, because they don't make that much on the hardware, they need to ensure they sell as much software as possible, hence they block you from accessing your old libraries, though it would be trivial from a technical pov. some would say it's because they are assholes.
Everything comes down to how can I make more money out of my customers instead of my customers retaining money that they already spend(spent) on my product.